Facebook wants to replace LinkedIn as the essential platform for job seekers

Facebook has its sights set on poaching LinkedIn’s 467 million users with the limited launch of its latest feature aimed at businesses and job seekers.

The new test sees select Facebook Pages receive access to a “jobs” tab which can be used to advertise new positions, and actively recruit workers. The section, first spotted by TechCrunch, marks the start of an experimental stage that could eventually see the company roll out a number of new recruitment features. If LinkedIn wasn’t worried about the social network in the past, it has every reason to be now.

“Based on behavior we’ve seen on Facebook, where many small businesses post about their job openings on their Page, we’re running a test for Page admins to create job postings and receive applications from candidates,” said a Facebook spokesperson.

Facebook broke down the new features for Digital Trends in an emailed statement. Page admins that have access to the jobs tab can now create a job posting using the Page composer. Job post details can include job title, job type (i.e. full-time, intern, part-time), salary info, and more. Job posts will appear along with other Page posts in the News Feed of followers, and within the jobs tab itself.

Facebook users can apply for a job by clicking “apply now,” which opens a standard application document complete with pre-populated information from the user’s public profile — meaning it would be handy to update your bio with your work history, if you haven’t done so already. Once submitted, the application will be received by the employer as a message.

The advantage of using the feature for businesses of all sizes is quite straightforward: access to an audience of 1.75 billion monthly active users. Facebook itself, of course, stands to reap extra revenue from employers looking to promote their openings in order to attract more eyeballs.

It could also potentially lead to more activity on the site, with users adding more personal info to their Facebook profiles (in the vein of a résumé), and businesses running multiple accounts to separate customer service from recruitment.

Additionally, the messaging aspect could prove a boon for Facebook Messenger. Despite boasting a huge user base of 1 billion members, Messenger could still do with a boost when it comes to its bot platform. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine bots handling the initial application process (for corporations at least), providing another use case for the burgeoning technology.